The Removers: A Memoir Read online

  By 1990 the student body and the number of priests had dwindled. The rectory was less than half full. The hall lights were kept off in daytime, and, on cloudy days especially, desolation prevailed. It rained the day after Dad told us of his firing. I was still wearing my eyebrows high on my forehead. I must’ve looked like that all day in class, too. Along with shock there was another new feeling, something different from the hormonal crankiness I’d been soaking in for the past six months. I had become aware of every step I took, every swipe of the mop, every reach for a rag or bottle. I remember looking out the rectory’s bathroom windows at passing El trains and thinking, There’s an El car. There’s another El car. There’s another El car. Anything like ease had gone from my brain and I felt as if I had moved into some inner chamber of myself where I observed everything but couldn’t be seen. Inside that command center the video monitors ran a steady loop of thoughts: the replay of Dad telling us, me wishing the four of us could go back to the time before he did, knowing the wish would always fail.

  My French teacher, Father Kibbie, was also in charge of the rectory, where he maintained an office as wide as two bedrooms, in the middle of the second floor. He was rarely in when I pushed my bucket by, but his door was always left open, shades drawn. Next to his desk in the permanent dusk of that old room a parrot perched in a cage. I would stop and look at him from the hallway, and he would regard me, too. A few times, when I was down the hall, out of sight, I’d heard him talk to Father Kibbie, but in all the times I’d stopped to eye him he’d never said a word.

  I knew that parrots could live close to a hundred years, and I wondered what if this weren’t Father Kibbie’s animal but had been in the room since 1933, passed down as a gift for each new head of the community. How many men had sat at that desk in sixty years and talked to him, spilled themselves in ways they wouldn’t to their fellow priests, the way one could only to a lover or a best friend? How many whispered names of longed-for men and women had he heard, how many doubts? How many joys, shared with this dull green bird, had taken on a sadness merely in the circumstance of their telling?

  * * *

  Only a few months went by while Dad was out of work. One semester he was teaching at La Salle, the next semester he was teaching at a community college in New Jersey. He might have been making half as much money and had lost his health insurance, but his exposure to public humiliation was mostly over. He was working, and no one seemed even to notice that he’d switched jobs. If they did, maybe they thought he’d been a victim of layoffs.

  * * *

  Circumstantial evidence:

  Because of how invested she was in her religion, with its intolerance of divorce; because a teacher at a Catholic grade school, with no union on her side, could be fired at the whim of the pastor for getting divorced; because of how little money she made; because of the shame of disappointing her happily married parents; because of her faith in my father finding his way; because of her wanting my sister and me to grow up with both parents, my mother stuck it out. She stayed.

  It never felt natural for one day.

  The word crisis comes from the Greek, meaning “choice,” but my sister and I grew up thinking it meant the opposite. It meant a fate imposed and not to be questioned. It meant something bad happens and you endure it. It meant a permanent repeating of private humiliation. It meant no choice at all.

  * * *

  It occurred to me at some point not long after he was fired and they stopped talking to each other—maybe it was when I was reading Death of a Salesman for class—that because I became so aware of when my father or mother entered a room, home often felt like we were onstage. Enter Dad stage right. Mom sighs, exits stage left. In effect, we had lost our house as a home. The place we lived was now the least comfortable, the least private place any of us occupied in a day. We went to school and work to relax and be alone and be ourselves. At least my sister and I had our own bedrooms. Our parents had no respite.

  If this was true, that the communal spaces in the house were all a stage, then my cassettes were switchblades that let me slice through the backdrop and step into a darkness where no one could see me. Or maybe this: If the depression that had started to grow in me felt like being locked in a command center full of surveillance monitors, then music opened a door from that room into a second room, a tiny, womb-like space with a bed and low ceilings painted gray. In this room I could forget myself, sleep if I wanted, let my body grow. And when I would forget myself, I would realize that the bands I loved—R.E.M. and the Smiths, mostly—were, elementally, families making sounds together. They were my families, these people I’d never met.

  Only a few weeks after the firing, Father Kibbie fell from a ladder and shattered his heel.

  This meant that French II moved to a classroom that could accommodate his wheelchair. In the new room’s arrangement I found myself seated next to Mr. Gazz. I didn’t know much about him—he was on the soccer team and the back of my head was his spitball target—and I didn’t like him. But we got used to each other. One day he was filling out a form to get free cassettes from Columbia House. He was ordering tapes by the Smiths, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, all groups that I thought I was the only kid in the room who liked. It seemed like every other boy at North, nearly 100 percent of them white, only liked hip-hop. I liked it too, but my freshman year there had been a melee between white kids and a few of the school’s only black kids, and by this year, nearly all the black kids had left. I found it maddening that in a place that felt so unwelcoming to blacks, everybody wanted to be a rapper. My sympathies and my underdeveloped sense of irony drove me to the whitest music around. Pretty soon Gazz and I had turned our corner of French class into a private booth. It wasn’t just the same music we loved. We spent time that should have been devoted to the passé composé passing jokes about local sportscasters, sharing story notes on the previous night’s episode of Thirtysomething, wondering how we’d make it until the new R.E.M. album came out. Once his soccer season ended, we got into the habit of talking every day after school, too, while he waited at the bus stop. One day it came up—he told me not in any way meant to win sympathy, just as an answer to a question about his family—that when he was twelve his nine-year-old brother had died from leukemia. Right away I loved him more than before. Right away the ritual that marked our daily parting—his bus approaching, us nodding a farewell, the both of us reaching for our headphones before turning away—made more sense.

  * * *

  Theresa’s bedroom had a window air conditioner, so on the hottest summer nights I slept on her floor. One night in June 1991—she was twelve, I was fifteen—she woke me up. “Look at my eye,” she said. It was swollen shut like a boxer’s. She’d already been awake examining it in the bathroom. Now it was the two of us. She sat on the toilet lid in her boxer shorts and tank top crying soft enough not to wake Mom and Dad. She threw up in the toilet and then sat back down on it. The flesh around her eye grew while she sat there until it was bulbous like a fly’s eye. I remember this sense of dread in my stomach, not just that she was sick but that our parents couldn’t take another calamity.

  The next morning Mom took her to the pediatrician, and from there to the emergency room. At first doctors thought she’d been bitten by a spider. Several days later someone concluded she had a staph infection in the orbital bone around her left eye. In the middle of her hospital stay I went to Nags Head as the one Meredith representative on what had been planned as our family vacation with the Hallers, my parents’ best friends, and their kids. I spent the week as only a selfish child could, lost in Wiffle ball and basketball games and on crabbing expeditions where we would tie a length of twine around a rotten chicken leg and drag it slowly through the low tide waters of Oregon Inlet. When we got back to Philadelphia, Theresa was out of the hospital and healing from surgery to reduce the swelling. She was left with a scar that runs inside the bridge of her nose. It was only later that my mother to
ld me there had been a few nights when I was away on vacation that the doctors had told my parents she could lose her eye and that dying from the infection was not impossible. Without insurance, they paid off Theresa’s hospital bills over the next several years. Their debts and stresses mounted.

  * * *

  A few days after Orville, I’m standing in a dead woman’s bedroom with a retired cop named George. We’re putting on our rubber gloves when a guy we hadn’t yet seen in the house comes storming down the hall toward us gripping a pair of long scissors like a knife. He’s wiry and short with long, lank hair and a mustache. His left eye’s a different shape from the right. The first word that forms in my head is “Manson.” His face is red, his mouth open as he comes at us. I assume that the removal of this woman’s body has deranged him. In these seconds I try to gauge whether he’ll stab us before we can wrestle the scissors away.

  But in his manic frenzy Manson moves past us and vaults himself up on the bed. He straddles the dead woman. He clips a few locks of her hair, whispers to her. He bounces off the bed and stalks away without ever having looked at us.

  Afterward in the hearse I say, “I thought he was going to kill us.”

  George says, “I’d kill you, too, if I thought you were there to hurt my mother.”

  I don’t say anything. Just think about my mom, who lives with so much pain and silence. I’d like to think I’d stab someone who hurt her, but I’ve never said word one to my father about anything.

  “Anyway,” George says, “as soon as I saw that bastard coming down the hall I had my hand on my gun.”

  I can tell George knows what I’m thinking. You’re carrying a gun? He’s a gentle-seeming guy who’s been urging me to go back to college. He brags about his son—“not much older than you,” he says—graduating soon from medical school.

  George keeps his eyes on the road. He says, “This is Frankford, son.”

  * * *

  A little more than a year after Dad was fired I’m walking home from school one day when I see my neighbor Richie Hollins. We’re juniors. He gets out after seventh period. I get out after eighth. He’s already changed clothes and is heading back out. He tells me he expects to get jumped today. The girl he’s seeing, her ex isn’t happy about her being with Richie. Her ex is a lanky, goofy kid who’d been a few years ahead of us in school. Richie lifts his pant leg and shows me an ankle-holstered pistol.

  That night I’m watching Homefront, a show about World War II soldiers newly returned from battle. At one of the commercial breaks, a tease for the local eleven o’clock news shows Richie, hands cuffed behind his back, stepping up into the back of a paddy wagon.

  Jumped by the goofy kid shot the goofy kid dead shot the goofy kid’s friend.

  For several days after that I just stare at my teachers without hearing them. I stare at my homework without lifting a pen. My history teacher knows I’ve grown up with Richie, sees I’m in a fog. He sends me to the school’s guidance counselor, who says, “Do you think maybe you’re upset because you’re putting yourself in Richie’s shoes? Are you projecting, Andy?” I have no idea what he means, only that he’s implying my shutting down is somehow my fault. I do know that other than the current spell of not being able to read or write, it doesn’t feel like I’m upset at all. I never feel close to tears. But my outsides have become even more frozen than before, and the tiny remnant of who I was before the house went silent has retreated even deeper inside the command center. This counselor is the first adult I’ve talked to intimately since my dad was fired, but he only asks questions about Richie Hollins. I don’t like him or trust him enough to say anything else.

  3

  “Andy, get me a bucket,” my father calls up from the cellar. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. He’s not usually an F-bomber. It’s Memorial Day, 1993, the day before my last week of high school. I am seventeen. He’s forty-five. He’s gained a paunch, and it’s taken him a while but he’s grown a full beard. One day in this era we’re driving together and another driver at an intersection waves us through a stop sign and yells as we pass, “Hey! Steven Spielberg!” When I hand him the empty bucket, Dad says, “Empty the Shop-Vac, will ya?” He’s bent over picking file folders full of drafts of old poems out of the muck. “Ah, Christ,” he says at the discovery of a fresh ruin. The iron soil pipe, three years shy of its ninetieth birthday, has caved in to old age. Six inches across, exposed, its outside a deep rusty brown and rough as stucco, it runs the length of the cellar wall from the back of the house to the front and out through the wall of Dad’s office to the curb, where it meets the city sewer system. Cracks in the soil pipe have caused minor floods down here the past few years, but today he’s come down to discover it crumbled, leaving the cellar an inch deep in wastewater. He keeps books and old records down here. Mom’s sewing machine and her fabrics are here. Theresa’s and my old toys are in boxes, among other boxes of china and silverware and glassware. Old tax returns. Christmas decorations. We walk the buckets upstairs, out through the kitchen, dump them on the grass in the backyard. My sister comes down to help, and then my mother.

  The muscles in my chest tighten when Mom starts down the steps. She’s forty-four, growing heavy and gray, too. When he’s around she closes herself behind a wall. She’s building a convent back there, no suitors allowed. There’s a school behind the wall, and a church. I’m always uncomfortable being in the same room with the both of them, but when something’s gone wrong—if the car breaks down or an issue with the house like this—it’s worse. It makes me feel for my father, and sympathy does not run easily from me to him in these days. Usually when he’s around I’m an ornery, passive-aggressive little fucker. I didn’t talk to him for a month or two after he was fired, and after that instead of Dad I started calling him Big Guy. He never said a word about it, just abided a fool’s condescension. But in this case it feels comical how rotten this is, shit in all his private files. No one deserves this. And to present the woman you’ve so severely disappointed with this latest misery seems beyond what anyone should have to take.

  The four of us work through the swampy late afternoon and evening, into the night, sweat dripping off our noses, jostling each other in close quarters but not talking, hot skin on skin with no eye contact, bailing buckets of our brown slop and toilet paper turned to white jelly.

  One part depression, this scene: life is miserable now; it’s inevitable, inescapable; how would we even begin to fight it? We’re knee-deep in shit.

  And one part naïveté: things aren’t so bad; nobody died, right; we’re all together.

  A few days later, a plumber, so he can replace the soil pipe, has a backhoe come and dig out the hedges and the ivy in front of our house. For years after this, nothing green grows. My mother plants new hedges, but they don’t take. We are the house on the block with a dirt patch out front.

  * * *

  In the hallway between my parents’ bedroom and mine was a narrow walk-in closet that held linens and towels and winter coats, and it was where the attic could be accessed by a splintery wooden ladder as old as the house. One day deep in the back, my body pressed between the ladder and a stack of folded sheets—I was maybe ten, bored, it was summer—I rifled my parents’ toiletry bag. Q-tips, travel toothbrushes, hotel shampoo, a small bottle of Sea Breeze for mosquito bites. Nothing new. I unzipped the last of a series of side pockets on a final stab at titillation, and there found a single Trojan condom. I remember thinking that I should be disgusted, as this seemed to be the common reaction by kids I knew at any hint of sexual affection between their parents, but I felt overcome by something like a deep reassurance.

  * * *

  This is when my idiocy started to pile up.

  In the middle years of high school I scored well enough on standardized tests that I got mail from colleges all over the country, places like UCLA and Northwestern and Miami. Enough came to fill cardboard boxes that took up almost all the space
under my bed. I was sleeping on a pile of tickets out of a house where no one spoke, out of a neighborhood where no one wanted to be, out of a city that hated itself more than I did. Of course one school was forbidden by good sense, one I couldn’t consider attending. How could I consider it? Why would I? Only one college among the thousands in North America was a choice that logic said I must banish, because it was the place that had banished my father, and it was the place where he betrayed the family, and it was a place of happy memories gone bitter.

  But idiots are predictable, and there was a feeling of inevitability about my going to La Salle. When he was fired, my father had made a deal that said, You can fire me, but my kids will get free tuition. I won a partial scholarship to Fordham’s campus at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, but the remainder was out of my parents’ range. I’d dreamed in high school of going to Northwestern or Syracuse for sportswriting, but their applications asked for essays I never got around to writing.

  I got a call the spring of senior year from the head of La Salle’s Honors Program. He talked to me a few minutes, told me I’d won a full scholarship. Apparently this guy had no idea who I was. He told me a little about what I should expect if I chose La Salle, how much of an advantage I’d have by taking Honors classes, and so on. I felt such relief from the thought that not only had I won a full scholarship but it was based on anonymous merit. I thanked him and we said our good-byes. As we were hanging up he said, “Oh, Andy, tell your dad I said hi.”